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The flaw in the Collective Leadership
System of the CPC: Insufficient authority and Internal Split

By
He Qinglian on May 7, 2012

The Collective Leadership System,
which the Communist Party of China (CPC) uses to disperse the highest
authority, is now facing grave crisis.

The
CPC, the Party which has always emphasized its entire membership to
be “in close solidarity with the Party Central that centers on
comrades so-and-so”, has shown the world clearly its severe
inner-split through the “Ouster of Bo Xilai” and the Chen
Guangcheng incident.

From the handling of the
Chen Guangcheng incident, the outside world could at least see two
“CPC Centrals” at loggerheads with each other. “Party Central
A” would be used below to indicate the openly visible Central
Committee; “Party Central B” would be used to refer to the
faction of top CPC members that is playing a role in the hiding and
people could only who the main figures are.

China and the United States
signed
an agreement based on
the wishes of Chen Guangcheng. Party Central A guaranteed Chen’s
freedom and safety; it
agreed that he could leave Linyi and choose a city inside
the country to live
in with his family, to study and would protect
his basic living.
Party
Central B, however, threatened Chen with the safety of his family,
forcing Chen to change his mind after he stepped out of the U.S.
embassy, which triggered a brief public relations crisis for the
U.S. State Department.

The
U.S. and the Chinese government then reached a new agreement, Party
Central A agreed that Chen could take his wife and children to
America; he could go to New York University as a visiting scholar.
The U.S. has made every preparation to receive him, as soon as his
foot injury is cured. Party Central A has also sent an official to
bring flowers to visit Chen, and promised to look into the dark veil
of Linyi's ultra-powerful stability maintenance measures that
targeted Chen, and have Chen's passport ready as quickly as possible.

But
on May Fourth, Beijing
Daily,
Beijing
Times,
Beijing
News,
and Beijing
Youth Daily,
the four leading media in Beijing published four commentaries on
Chen's entering the U.S. embassy in China, producing a symphonic
ensemble of “Opposing the U.S. and criticizing Chen”. Given that
all these four newspapers are managed by Beijing Municipal
government, people have come to ponder the possibility of Beijing
city being a stronghold of Party Central B.

There
is another detail that I have to mention: so far the whole process of
Chen fleeing surveillance and entering the U.S. embassy, only the
part after his arrival in Beijing is clear and trustworthy. The New
York Times ran an article on May 2, which mentioned that when the
Chen was passed to the U.S. embassy official, the car of the rescuers
and that of the U.S. embassy was tailed by a state security vehicle
respectively. The U.S. only informed China's Ministry of Foreign
Affairs after they settled Chen in the U.S. marine dormitory. This
means Chen entered the U.S. embassy under the watchful eyes of
Chinese state security agents, who did not make timely report to the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which should have been informed at the
earliest time possible.

It
could be assumed from this that Party Central B wanted incidents like
Chen Guangcheng “making abnormal entry” to the U.S. embassy in
China to happen, so as to use that to create trouble for Party
Central A. The subsequent concerted criticism from the four Beijing
newspapers appeared to be in line with this behavior.

What
is interesting is that, after the occurrence of the Chen Guangcheng
incident, Party Central A's actions of feeding information to the
outside world and kite-flying through various channels to portray Bo
Xilai and his wife as total villains has stopped. The eyeballs of
international media have quite naturally been attracted to the Chen
Guangcheng incident. The shift of attention between the two is
blindly obvious to anyone; not necessarily everyone could guess the
secrets behind it, though.

Modeled after the Post-Stalin
Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the collective leadership
system was initially designed to prevent personal dictatorship of the
Party leader. Although this could help avert the potential harms of
personal dictatorship like that of Mao Zedong, it leads to the
decentralization of top level authority. With nine members, the
Central Politburo Standing Committee now is up by two compared to the
seven-member Standing Committee of the Jiang Zemin era. Such a system
could at best make it harder for the top-level authority to reach
unanimity; at worst, it would mean a greater likelihood of infighting
and mutual constraints when it comes to divisive political issues
that are of significance, such as successors, the formation of the
next Politburo Standing Committee and so on.

At times when the economy is
doing okay, this type of inner-party struggle is limited by the
top-level wishes to maintain overall stability and would not erupt
into life-and-death disputes that unfold in front of the public. A
smooth transition of power would be more likely, as was the case when
Jiang Zemin of the third generation of the CPC leadership smoothly
transferred power to Hu Jintao of the fourth generation.

But
when serious problems happen to the economy, the top level could
split, and the successors chosen according to the wishes of the top
leaders might not be able to have a smooth takeover, the incumbent
party leader might also be unable to control the situation. This type
of incident has happened in the history of the CPSU. For instance,
when Nikata Khrushchev was in office, the economy of the Soviet Union
gradually deteriorated; and senior CPSU members made a collective
decision behind his back to replace the General Secretary.

After
Deng Xiaoping, the Communist Party of China basically inherited the
collective leadership system of the CPSU, and took it one step
further: using age as the reason, new members are added to the top
level of the Party every five years to replace the older ones. Seemingly a solution to ensuring
a smooth transition, this would work only when the economy is doing
okay. Once the economic and social conditions have deteriorated, the
infighting would surely rise to the surface.

And
now, the allegations Party Central B makes against Party Central A
serve as perfect evidence. However, the Party Central B does not have
an upper hand in the institutional framework.

At
the moment, senior CPC members headed by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao
have in their hands resources within the system, for example the
supreme power in the Party, the government, and the military. Yet,
their weaknesses are the extremely corrupt officials, the lack of
noteworthy political achievements, the tension between the
government and the public is on the verge of ignition. Except for Wen
Jiabao the skilled pacifier, they have almost completely lost the
hearts of the people.

If
it is said that at the time when Hu and Wen succeeded Jiang Zemin and
Zhu Rongji, China had already had various hidden diseases—as I
pointed out in my book, the Pitfalls of Modernization.
However, those diseases were only at the initial stage back then,
things looked good on the outside and the outsiders could hardly tell
the impending ulceration.

Things in China today could in no way
be comparable to the situation back when the transition between the
third and fourth generation leadership took place. At that time, Zhu
Rongji passed on a more reliable source of tax revenue for the
central government by concentrating resources on the development of
large enterprises, leaving the small and medium sized companies to
fend for themselves, and re-establishing state-owned enterprises
monopoly. Environmental resources at that time had not yet been
depleted.

In
today's China, however, all that Hu and Wen would leave behind are a
power structure and an enormous stability maintenance apparatus, apart
from an environment and ecosystem that have holes all over, a central
finance which revenue could not cover the expenses, and debt-laden
local governments. That
the political faction headed by Bo Xilai challenges Hu and Wen is
based on this: the country our fathers fought and died for,
you reduced it to this! We must save the Party. The ideology weapon
they use is the founding father of the Red regime—Mao Zedong and
his thoughts. Superficially, the faction does not have apparent
representative except Bo Xilai; however, its presence could be felt
everywhere in the capital. This
time what the four leading newspapers of Beijing manifested is
exactly this force. (Those articles did not necessarily reflect the attitude of the media practitioners; rather, they might have manifested the wishes of the people in control of those media.)

Because
Wen Jiabao of Party Central A made verbal statements that universal
values, democracy, human rights are respected, the faction enjoys
some support from the intelligentsia; on the other hand, Party
Central B seeks political legitimacy by worshiping Mao and
fabricating [tales] of an equal society and the illusory leadership
of the worker-peasant class during the time of Mao and manages to
secure some popularity among some members of the 'Red
second-generation' and the bottom of society.

Naturally, Western countries do not
like the Cultural Revolution worship tendency that Bo manifested.
Therefore, with the exception of a few foreigners who have been
bribed, foreign media seldom rate Bo positively. What the foreign
watchers failed to comprehend is that: no matter who come to power,
they could not do anything to [solve] the economic,
social, and environmental problems of China, nor could they change
the existing system of benefits distribution. Wen may not genuinely
lead China to the path of democracy; Bo and his supporters may not be
able to implement the closed-door policy of the earlier years of the
Mao Zedong era, either. In fact, Party Central B does not have any
sound strategy to save the Party, all it could do is to keep making a
fuss about ideology.

Throughout the history of Communist countries, this is for the first time two legitimate ideologies within the Party are being used by the two sides in a power struggle, neither could portray the rival as anti-Party. Even if this struggle ended with Party Central A emerged victorious for now, the split within the Party remains.

The
Communist Party has two choices in front of it: either it adheres to
the one-party dictatorship, changes the system of high-level
authority decentralization that is currently in place and strengthens
the position of the Party leader—which does not necessarily help it
avoid the downfall of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi; or it
reforms the political system. The problem now is, there is not much
resource left in China to support such a reform.